Reddit CEO pledges site will remain “written by humans and voted on by humans”
But Huffman said Reddit was now battling to ensure its users stay at the center of the social network. “Where the rest of the internet seems to be powered by or written by or summarized by AI, Reddit is distinctly human,” he said. “It’s the place you go when you want to hear from people, their lived experiences, their perspectives, their recommendations. Reddit is communities and human curation and conversation and authenticity.”
As Reddit becomes an increasingly important source for LLMs, advertisers are responding with what one agency chief described as a “massive migration” to the platform.
Multiple advertising and agency executives speaking during this month’s Cannes advertising festival told the FT that brands were increasingly exploring hosting a business account and posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/reddit-ceo-pledges-site-will-remain-written-by-humans-and-voted-on-by-humans/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
Starting when?
That ship has sailed.
The ship was never at that port.
Reddit was using bots and vote manipulators back to the Digg days, as well as scraping/reposting akin to what 9gag became famous for.
Anyone who participated in any r(slash)place could tell you this has been a lie for at least a few years.
I know he's just selling the platform to AI companies, but it's an odd take considering they've been moving away from being a message board and towards being just another content feed for years now.
Looked up some information a bit ago and found Reddit using AI written answer pages to aggregate information. Which- why? The information was already indexed by a search engine, the sole reason I landed on this page. Why are you offering me secondhand, watered down information written by your idiot machine when I can instead read sourced accounts with citations?
It’s interesting to know that you can do this, but I could not care less about a machine’s perspective on what is or is not the prevailing opinion. Moreover, it completely contradicts your stated goal, you perjurious pool of feculence.
They became Facebook 2.0. also interesting they block Facebook and FB as a term now too.
Half of the comments are from bots and everyone gets autobanned.
Reddit is quite literally on autopilot
And the other half are re-posts.
It's being propped up by AI and bots currently, at some point he must've realized that he banned too many people, and he couldn't openly unban them to restore the numbersz so he went the Meta route
He didn't say entirely or how many, lol. If there's 2 humans writing, it's technically still, "It's the place you go when you want to hear from people."
Exactly what I thought, cause a lot of comments are from bots and even the ones that appear from humans aren't necessarily humans. How can you say it remains like it is now and it is written by humans at the same time?
The site is loaded with engagement bots, and that has increased exponentially in the last year. Before I left, I was constantly getting pinged with inane questions to try to elicit a response (engagement). So much different here.
Does it count as "a human" if it's a bot reposting human-made content for the 50th time?
I'd say the content will forever remain "human written content", but also that it being once written by a human doesn't mean the repost is a valuable addition to reddit.
I don't believe him.
Wow, that's a bit unfair. What has he ever done to show he's a lying, money grabbing, scummy piece of shit?
Remember how corporations are people? Well, bots can be human if you pay enough.
"exploring" meaning they've been doing it for more than 5 years already and just got another incentive to continue doing so
If we don’t look for bots, there aren’t any. Sounds more republican every day. If we don’t record covid deaths, there aren’t any.
Any text based sub hitting all regularly is full of AI slop and sensational stories. Wouldn't be like this is Aaron were still around.
Maybe he shouldn't have permabanned all of us power users after the Inauguration. He might have some active humans posting if he hadn't let the DOGE Goblin intimidate him into firing all of his best posters, the ones who built Reddit into what it was over the past decade. WE were Reddit, not bots, and now we're gone, and only the bots remain.
Good job, Spez.
I'm glad he did, I like Lemmy so much more.
People here don’t commonly wish for your death while insulting your grandmother. It’s peaceful.
I hope you are enjoying life, and your grandmother is a wonderful lady.
I've had something close to this coming from the good folks of hexbear when I said I was french. Apparently I am barred from talking about imperialism because of my citizenship
ML did similar to me for not agreeing with their interpretation of life.
they were already on the 4th purge by the time i was permaban in feb, from nov-5th. and then im guessing they switched to using more insidious shadowbans, so people wont notice huge drop in users at once if its done randomly by AI, and shadowbans to alert the accounts that they are banned too.
The only thing I miss from reddit was reddit gifts. That was the true peak.
I'm guessing he hasn't browsed his own site recently then.
Probably nothing there to interest him since they banned /r/jailbait
Ironically the fact that Star Trek is the one of the only specific media franchises that can maintain an active community on Lemmy explains it.
Still praying for the dropout community to migrate.
What's Bezos got to do with this discussion?
Not by this human.
Pretty sure all the humans left Reddit like two years ago.
For me it was a few hours ago. My first profile got banned for "inciting violence" cause I said "fuck trump and Obama". And just got my other account banned for inciting violence but they deleted the comment so I can't tell you what exactly I said, but it's not in my nature to actually advocate for violence.
I believe I was followed around by some trumptard, cause I'm a pretty out and loud leftist. I'm not going through the trouble of creating another one as I have been using it very infrequently since discovering boost for Android. Plus I don't want to help them pad their numbers, or be at the wim of some ai system that doesn't even read the comment and just auto bans.
Conservatives absolutely gamed the reporting system. I once got a hit for standing up for gay people (I am one) because I summarized and ridiculed someone else’s comment that was anti gay. It was a honeypot.
50% of all users are bots
Ha ha ha. Spez can be hilarious when he wants to be.
He's an alien trying to act human
Woah. A pledge from a CEO. There’s no way this is meaningless PR bullshit. We better take it seriously.
A pledge from a humanoid creature
"Trust me!" says yet another capitalist.
How does that work when your auto-banning everyone?
By using AI to simulate human behavior on reddit, just like Facebook is doing
Reddit is filled to the brim with bots.
...with AI admin and moderation. Anyone who's been banned from reddit will tell you that, hell it says as much in the message they give you. I was banned once for saying "slava ukraini" which according to my ban was a direct attack at a minority (apparently russians are a minority according to reddit bots) and then another for asking how long before citizens begin shooting at ICE agents which, again according to reddit bots, was inciting violence on a minority (ICE agents are now also a minority according to reddit).
the vast majority of posts and comments are bots. the obvious reposts with misleading titles to generate karma to allow said bots to have enough karma to then post on various other subreddits to push whatever bullshit agenda or product they want to push.
im on the forum where people are doing that, pushing thier products, and businesses. but reddit only went after these users, and not propaganda bots.
Fuck, can this loser just fuck off into oblivion already?? You got your money pig boi now piss off!
It’s like Zuck. Why do you keep at it? You won already. The answer is that they are deeply flawed people who needed to go into therapy decades back.
Yeah there's something deeply wrong with them
He can't let people poison the training data, or else his site will have no value to its customers.
how cn we poison the training data for llms? only ever saw stuff for image gen-
imfo: i updated the spelling. it was unreadably bad before.
That's how.
oh god >~< i actually didnt realize autocomplete wasnt working at all heheheheeee....
i.... will fix up the message, this is actually unreadable.... did not mean to go that far >v<
If LLMs train on text output from LLMs, the results will degenerate into total garbage over time. The people that buy reddit data for LLM training know this. They will stop buying if they think there's a lot of LLM text on Reddit.
Garbage in, garbage out.
True, but this is an advertisement for something that doesn't exist.
… and mined and monetized by AI
Fuck /u/spez
https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/26/reddit-is-being-spammed-by-ai-bots-and-its-all-reddits-fault/
Whoa! whats this? Hm.
Sounds like a AI saying it. Half of reddits users are bots, mostly ran by AI
It's really wild that the guy who co-founded Reddit is so universally hated by the users.
Talk about having completely lost touch.
He started groveling to musk, when Xitter was bought
Maybe so but he made enough money for that second yacht.
If he'd tried to nurture some goodwill, perhaps the users wouldn't so harshly reject all attempts at monetization.
Perhaps then he'd be able to afford yachts that don't look so puny next to those of other social media oligarchs and could go to bed with the satisfaction of having made a profit at least once in his life.
In q1 or 2025 reddit racked in about 390 million dollars.
Spez is worth about 50 million in liquidity and 191 million is stocks.
A 131 foot yacht is being sold for around 15 million.
He can get whatever yacht he wants.
Reddit made major, massive profits when it went public.
We don't have to like it, we don't have to like spez... But he made fuck tones of money.
And we're supposed to take his word for it?
Yeah, they may not have AI generated content (yet) but I left because their AI moderators REPEATEDLY warned/banned me from the site. Every time I sent a protest letter and had an actual person look at the post, I was unbanned, but I am fed the fuck up. That site is a study in enshittification. I am done with those assholes.
And, if they think I'm going to let them scan my retina in order to post, they can fuck right off.
You're lucky they ignore most ban appeals banned by AI, including mines. And the shadowban sub complained the same
LOL!
Whistling past a few graveyards
Then maybe they should stop banning all their human users.
meh, haven't been to reddit in months. nothing but bots arguing with bots. won't miss it. /fuckspez
Really? So he's going to get rid of all the bots?
Except the ones pushing right wing propaganda.
It's gotten to the point that if someone were to ask me what my super power would be if I could choose, I'd say that I'd like to be able to see what is human and what isn't when I'm online. Very boring super power, but it would make some things a lot easier.
Ironically I also lost count on how many times I was accused of being a bot near the end of my time on reddit. I wouldn't be surprised if those who accused me were bots themselves. It was just insane sometimes.
But good luck with that, Mr CEO. I'm sure you care very much about your human users on your goofy platform.
Me too...any tips for spotting it?
It is so tricky and i dont have any good answers as I'm a tech-idiot, but I'll try my best to give you some suggestions:
In the past you may come across a comment that sounded overly robotic and emotionless when they commented, but that might as well just be someone on the spectrum. Nowadays some bot comments sound more human than actual human comments. I really cannot tell.
I think I was often accused of being a bot because I tend to go into detail about things that interest me and try to explain things in too many paragraphs, lol. I have tried to learn how to shorten my replies to people but I fucking fail everytime. I literally just spammed a friend with a long ramble about why the Syrian flag looks different and went into the history of the flag and made a cliff notes version of the conflict in Syria because it randomly became an interest for me for a few minutes after a car passed my window with the new Syrian flag on the car helmet. So maybe that trait is a bit off putting to random people who cross my path online. I dunno.
Anyway, I have heard that some people look at sentence structure and grammar to decipher who is real and who isn't. If the grammar is too good, the sentence structures too perfect, then some people suspect it is a bot. But it's probably just a matter of time before bots will adapt to poor grammar and writing patterns. If they can go from sounding like a Wikipedia page to cracking jokes and sounding human in less than five years, they can learn how to imitate shitty writing patterns that most of us have. I for one tend to accidentally press the s when I want to press the a and I usually catch it before posting, but sometimes I overlook it.
Usually, on reddit, I would check the comment history of someone I suspected of being a bot. If they posted way too much, like seconds between each comment and in various different subs for hours, I would conclude they were a bot, but I don't think all bots are like that.
I dunno how I would spot bots in the fediverse, tbh. Maybe similar, checking the comment history if i suspect a bot, but otherwise i dunno man.
Usually I go by how people behave. Anyone who acts insane or aggressive gets blocked. I am too old to deal with shit like that, but that has less to do with bots and more to do with no longer tolerating extremely divisive behavior.
That's really helpful thanks mate. And I agree, banging your head against a brick wall just hurts your head
The twist - AI was originally trained on human input, so it's human even with 99% bots, from a certain point of view.
You will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.
lol
Lmao, even
So he wants it to be a huge testing grounds with ai for anybody that uses it, got it.
Use the platform? You are talking with and training AI.
he wants to be facebook essentially, also like to point out that reddit bans the word facebook and FB.
Ewwww why (besides the obvious lack of moral-compass greed) would you want to be Facebook?
$$$$
And controlled by 15 mods.
not this human
sent from my pinephone
I'm wondering if advertisers are starting to notice - that's the only thing that'll make these fuckers try to clean house. It's maybe two years since I left reddit and even then it was absolutely infested with bots. They didn't give a fuck, only cared about the IPO. But advertisers are going to care when they get lots of engagement but no customers because all the engagement is bots.
Do they have a way to test that? Surely the advertisers wouldn't just trust meta, google, reddit, etc.
I've worked on some enterprise projects specifically to detect bot activity, so that they wouldn't waste ML resources on a fake customer. While it's a bit of a cat and mouse game, they can certainly review past data for their advertising campaign and the conversion rates they are getting in order to determine if reddit ads are worth the money
That's good to hear, I hope they have many fights about it.
"remain"? They really don't use their own service, do they?
Yeah, can't have your excellent training data getting polluted
Butt Huffman said*
Ftfy
"Oh, you left reddit for Lemmy? Welcome! Enjoy the conversations about reddit."
When they're being made fun of? Yes, I'm absolutely enjoying it.
Ah ! so when do they roll it back ?
meanwhile in the average comment section there...
Bots dominate Reddit. This will never change. Straight lying to everyone's faces.
"Advertising Festival" sounds like my own personal Hell.
They were actually doing great combating bots in the past, loved reading their biannual reports on the subject, but after they partnered with AI I don't think there is any benefit of the doubt to give.
Prove it Huffman!
Cool story!
Lol
no one cares
What's reddit?
(Although there is always the failwhale site...)
(Or maybe Telegram.)
Who care when people just get auto banned for obnoxious things. Get bent.
shitddit ceo is lying
And I want to be a millionaire!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
They chase away the humans and ban the ones that are left!
fuckoff spez
Site as in code or site as in content? Incan believe the former, not the latter
(And bots.)